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A rare departure from Wednesdays for Dac, but this Merlin offering is excellent. To begin with I found it very easy and it seemed that all would be done quickly by my standards, but I came to a halt; was completely beaten by the brilliant 13ac and had to use aids for a couple of others.

Across

1

FASTNESS — 2 defs

5

AG(END)A

10

RANSOM E — he appears fairly regularly as an answer in cryptic crosswords, or perhaps it’s just that I’ve always noticed it. R, N, O, E, are probably quite a common combination (like the letters in Countdown that make the fairly rare word LEOTARD appear so often)

This entry was posted on Wednesday, July 22nd, 2009 at 12:22 pm and is filed under Independent.
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Hear hear – a very enjoyable solve. Having only recently started solving the Indy regularly Merlin is new to me; I’ll be looking out for more Merlin in future.

The BROWN / SUGAR spot is absolutely superb and, of course, hugely topical. I was going to say I wondered if that topicality could have been exploited more but, in fairness, I’ve just had a bit of a play with it myself and couldn’t find anything convincing. My chorus of approval for WHODUNNITS has to be slightly muted – Murphy’s Law, only a month ago I supplied a magazine cryptic with the singular version which began “I hunt down criminal…”. Merlin’s interpretation is of course excellent.

MY GENERATION is fantastic. “Who delivered this” as the def, “DNA delivered to me?” a very nice suggestion of genealogy (I suspect “delivered” is referring to childbirth).

The only slight quibble was the LOOSENING anagrind which I assume is “up”? The phrase “what’s up?” equates to “what’s wrong?” but I wonder if the transplant is sound enough?